Eric P. Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of
Anglo-Americapresents the case that Anglo-America
committed what one might call “suicide by idea”: White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants
were motivated to give up ethnic hegemony by their attachment to Enlightenment
ideals of individualism and liberty. Anglo-Americans simply followed these
ideals of the Enlightenment to their logical conclusion, with the result that
immigration was opened up to all peoples of the world, multiculturalism became
the cultural ideal, and Whites willingly allowed themselves to be displaced from
their preeminent position among the elites of business, media, politics, and the
academic world.

Kaufmann explicitly rejects the proposal that the decline of
Anglo-America occurred as a result of some external force. His view is therefore
an important contrast to my
view that the rise of Jews to elite
status in the United States and particular Jewish intellectual and political
movements (e.g., the movement to open immigration to all the peoples of the
world) were critically necessary (not sufficient) conditions for the collapse of
White America. My view is that the outcome was the result of ethnic conflict over the construction
of culture. Indeed, the fall of Anglo-Saxon
America is a textbook case of how deadly the conflict over the construction of
culture can be.

In this review, I will
show where Kaufmann goes wrong — mainly by committing sins of omission in
ignoring the Jewish role in the decline of Anglo-America. But it must be said
that he provides a fascinating historical overview of the decline of Whites in
the US. As he notes, it was not very long ago that America strongly asserted
that it was a nation of Northwestern Europeans and intended to stay that way.
The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act was carefully designed to preserve the ethnic status quo as
of 1890, thereby ensuring the dominance of Anglo-Americans. In 1952, the
McCarran-Walter Act reiterated the bias toward Northwestern Europe and was
passed over President Truman’s veto.

But only a decade later,
in the 1960s, White America began the process of ethnic and cultural suicide:

By
the 1960s, as if by magic, the centuries-old machinery of WASP America began to
stall like the spacecraft of Martian invaders in the contemporary hit film, War of the Worlds. In 1960, the first
non-Protestant president was elected. In 1965, the national origins quota regime
for immigration was replaced by a “color-blind” system. Meanwhile,
Anglo-Protestants faded from the class photos of the economic, political, and
cultural elite — their numbers declining rapidly, year upon year, in the
universities, boardrooms, cabinets, courts, and legislatures. At the mass level,
the cords holding Anglo-Protestant Americans together began to unwind as secular
associations and mainline churches lost millions of members while the first
truly national, non-WASP cultural icons appeared. (pp. 2–3)

While it is certainly
true that other ethnic groups have gone into historical decline or have been
replaced by force, the decline of Anglo-America seems mysterious. There are no
conquering armies that would easily explain their impending exit from the stage
of history.

But despite its obvious
importance as an historical phenomenon, as Kaufmann notes, there has been almost
no academic attention to the causes of this very precipitous decline. Perhaps
some things are better left unsaid, at least until the losers of this revolution
are safely relegated to a powerless position.

In the first section, I
sketch how a segment of elite White intellectuals saw themselves and America in
the nineteenth century. This is an important part of Kaufmann's narrative
because he argues that the seeds of the displacement of Whites were sown in
earlier centuries and merely came to fruition in the 1960s and later. The
following are the main conclusions:

Many elite White
intellectuals and political figures correctly saw that individualism and
universalism were ethnic traits traceable to their Germanic ancestors.

White liberals during
the 19th century often had a muddled view of race, thinking that environmental
changes would quickly alter racial traits.

Even White liberals
imagined that in the future America would be populated by people like them —
White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

Liberal attitudes on
race were part of elite culture emanating from the Puritan strand of American
culture, and already in the 19th century there was a gap between elite and
popular attitudes.

Confident
assertions of White ethnic identity are virtually non-existent these days.
However, Kaufmann shows that in the 18th and 19th centuries, Anglo-Americans had
a strong sense that they were the biological descendants of freedom loving
Anglo-Saxon tribes: “The New England town meeting was likened to the Anglo-Saxon
tribal council, and the statements of
Tacitusregarding the free, egalitarian
qualities of the Anglo-Saxons were given an American interpretation” (p. 18).
(For example, Tacitus: "The king or the chief, according to age, birth,
distinction in war, or eloquence, is heard, more because he has influence to
persuade than because he has power to command. If his sentiments displease them,
they reject them with murmurs; if they are satisfied, they brandish their
spears.")

The “Yeoman
farmer” was considered the ethnic prototype. After drafting the Constitution,
Thomas Jefferson stated that Americans are “the children of Israel in the
wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night; and on the
other side, Hengist
and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honour
of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we
have assumed” (pp. 17–18; emphasis in text).

Similar
statements of ethnic confidence were common among intellectuals and politicians
in the period preceding the Mexican-American war. For example, in 1846 Walt
Whitman wrote, “What has miserable, inefficient Mexico … to do … with the
mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?” (p. 22).

As
a cultural historian, Kaufmann interprets ethnic self-conceptions as myths. But
in fact it is entirely reasonable to look for the peculiar traits and tendencies
of Europeans as adaptations to prolonged life in a situation characterized by
harsh climates and the relative absence of between-group competition. I have
argued that evolution in the North has predisposed Europeans to the
following two critical traits that are entirely unique among the traditional
cultures of the world:

1.A de-emphasis on extended kinship relationships and a relative
lack of ethnocentrism.

2.
A tendency toward individualism and all of its implications: individual rights
against the state, representative government, moral universalism, and science.

In other words,
Jefferson was quite probably correct to view the Anglo-Saxon tendencies toward
individualism and representative government as ethnic traits. A critical feature
of individualism is that group boundaries are relatively permeable and
assimilation is the norm. As Kaufmann notes, even in the 19th century,
individualism resulted in assimilation rather than maintaining impermeable
boundaries with other Whites: “Interethnic relations followed a pattern of
Anglo-conformity. … Immigrants were to be made into American WASPs by absorbing
American English, American Liberty, and American Protestantism and, ultimately,
by intermarrying with Americans” (p. 19).

For example, in
the late 18th century, the response to large-scale German settlements in
Pennsylvania was to reject German-American separatism and a multicultural model
of America. Attempts to make German an official language and have laws written
in German were rebuffed. German-Americans began Anglicizing their names to
better fit into the American milieu.

There was an
assumption, even among many liberals, that these ethnic others would look and
act like Anglo-Americans. In the 19th century, liberals typically had “an
optimistic, expansionist Anglo-conformism that accepted the immigrants, provided
they looked like Anglo-Protestants and assimilated to the WASP mytho-symbolic
corpus” (p. 37).

Double Consciousness: The Tension between
Individualism and Ethnic Identity

Nineteenth-century American
intellectuals tended to have what Ralph Waldo Emerson called a “double
consciousness” — a tendency to think of America as committed to a non-racial
liberal cosmopolitanism as well as a tendency to identify strongly with their
Anglo-Saxon ethnicity. This fits with individualism because the ideal is to
assimilate others rather than to erect strong ethnic boundaries.

During this period expressions of double consciousness can be
found among the intellectual elite in which assertions of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity
coexisted with statements of universalism.

Emerson himself was an
example of double consciousness. He wrote that America was “the asylum of all
nations. … [T]he energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles and Cossacks, and all the
European tribes, of the Africans and Polynesians, will construct a new race … as
vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting pot of the Dark Ages.”
This very clear statement of universalism co-existed with the following
statement from around the same time: “It cannot be maintained by any candid
person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any
very high place in the human family. … The Irish cannot; the American Indian
cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all other
races have quailed and done obeisance” (pp. 44–45).

Despite Kaufmann’s claims, these ideas are not really
contradictory — the idea that there are differences between the races is
compatible with the idea that eventually the races will amalgamate and be better
for it. In his book English
Traits, Emerson acknowledges
racial differences:“Race is a
controlling influence in the Jew who, for two millenniums, under every climate,
has preserved the same character and employments. Race in the negro is of
appalling importance” (p. 27). However, he maintains that racial boundaries are
weak and that “the best nations are those the most widely related; and
navigation, as effecting a worldwide mixture, is the most potent advancer of
nations” (p. 28).

What is odd is
Emerson’s belief that the English race could remain the English race even after
absorbing other races. Emerson thought that immigrants to America would
literally be assimilated to the English race: The “foreign element [in America],
however considerable, is rapidly assimilated,” resulting in a population of
“English descent and language” (my
emphasis). This is an example of the muddled thinking on race that was
characteristic of many intellectuals during the 19th century.

Kaufmann reviews
the various strains of 19th-century liberalism that de-emphasized White or
Anglo-Saxon identity. These were not majority views, but they do point to a
robust strand among secular and religious intellectual elites associated with a
New England Puritan background in the direction of a deracinated
cosmopolitanism. Emerson, certainly, was a liberal, as were his fellow
Transcendentalists
and Unitarians.

Muddled Thinking about Race: The
influence of Lamarck

The bottom line is that,
as Kaufmann says, “a good case can be made that ethnic (“race”) thinking in the
nineteenth century was largely a muddled, incoherent enterprise” (p. 54). The
basic problem was that these thinkers were Lamarckians — that
is, they believed that people could inherit traits that their ancestors had
acquired during their lifetimes. With Lamarck rather than Darwin as inspiration,
race and culture were conflated. Liberal intellectuals thought that blacks would become white
with more education, like “the running of a dirty stream into a pellucid lake
which eventually clears leaving no trace of mud” (p. 56). Immigrants of all
strains could become good Anglo-Saxons.

Lamarck's theory has
always been a darling of the left because it holds the promise that inherited
traits can easily be changed simply by changing the environment. It is no
accident that Lamarckism became official ideology in the Soviet Union (and among
many Jewish leftists) precisely
because it implied that it would be quite easy to mold the new Soviet man — or,
as Lysenko thought, to develop crops
that could flourish in cold climates.

In the hands of the
Anglo-Saxon assimilationists,
Lamarckism was part of the optimistic spirit of elite 19th-century liberal
intellectuals who envisioned a future America to be people just like themselves,
no matter what their origins.

Self-interest and Liberal Ideology.
An
ethnic tendency toward individualism makes people less likely to erect barriers
to other groups. But individualists are certainly capable of developing a sense
of ethnic identity. In fact, we have seen that it was quite common for
Anglo-Saxons to think of individualism as resulting from their ethnic heritage.
However, individualists are relatively less ethnocentric, and as a result it is
relatively easy for other motivations to predominate. These motivations can
range from libertarian self-actualization to self-interested business practices
that, for example, promote non-White immigration if there are economic benefits
to be had.

Kaufmann points to a general tendency — still apparent today — in which elite Protestants made alliances with immigrant
groups (including non-White immigrants such as Chinese on the West Coast in the
1870s) to encourage immigration. These forces opposed the forces of ethnic
defense represented by middle and working class Anglo-Protestants of both
parties. "To quell dissent within their party, Republican elites accused their
populist wing of racism and ethnic bigotry” (p. 59) — a trend that remains quite
common today.

As
is the case today, people with the most liberal attitudes were not personally
threatened by upholding liberal attitudes (e.g., pro-Chinese immigration in
areas where there were no Chinese). Or liberals imagined that “divine providence
... would keep Chinese numbers in the United States to a minimum” (p. 65).
Again, there is quite a bit of muddlement: Republicans like William Seward “who
backed equal rights for blacks and favored Chinese immigration, fervently
believed in the separation of the races and in the homogeneity of the nation”
(p. 65).

Four American
Liberal Intellectual Traditions from the late 19th century to the present:
Libertarian Anarchism, Liberal Protestantism, Academic Cultural Determinism, and
the Secular Left

Americans like myself
who are distressed at the decline and displacement of Whites, the rise of
multiculturalism, and massive non-White immigration must acknowledge the strong
strands of American culture that have facilitated these phenomena. On one hand,
individualism and its cluster of related traits (moral universalism, science)
are the basic features of Western modernization — the features that have allowed
Western cultures to dominate the world and to colonize areas far away from their
European homeland.

On the other hand,
because of its relative lack of ethnocentrism and its tendencies toward
assimilation rather than erecting ingroup/outgroup barriers, an important strand
of American individualism has been to develop wildly optimistic and idealistic
theories of the American future. We have seen that liberal theorists of the 19th
century saw a future America as dominated by people who looked and thought like
themselves: Even people from different races would ultimately become White
Anglo-Saxon and Protestant no matter what their racial background.

Kaufmann points to four
different liberal intellectual traditions all of which had their origin in the
19th century and all still present today. Each of them may be seen as a
different expression of individualism.

Libertarian Anarchism. The
19th-centuiry liberal intellectual tradition of the Transcendentalists and
Unitarians stemmed from the Puritan
tradition centered in New England and its elite universities. Another strain of
New England liberalism is represented by the libertarian anarchists, typified by
Benjamin
Tucker, a believer in unfettered
individualism and opposed to prohibitions on non-invasive behavior (“free love”,
etc.). But even these libertarians were conscious that their attitudes sprang
from their ethnic heritage. As Kaufmann notes, “the radical
tradition [of anarchic individualism] did not necessarily point in a
cosmopolitan direction, but, as with radical figures, such as Thomas Jefferson,
Horace Greeley, Emerson, and Walt Whitman, often reinforced ethnonational pride.
… Anarchist logic did not wipe clear all traces of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant
attachment. Evidently, the cosmopolitan paradigm had yet to fully shake its
cognitive ballast of dominant ethnicity” (pp. 88–89).

A large part of
the vision of what Kaufmann calls the “expressive pathfinders” in the early 20th
century was a rebellion against small-town Protestant America, its sexual
repression, and its other mores which resulted in exclusion of some (e.g.,
homosexuals). This expressive individualist avant-garde culture of New York was not
significant in the 19th century, being overshadowed by the genteel radicalism
emanating from New England. The new Bohemians in Greenwich Village (ca.
1910–1917) were led by Max Eastman (1883–1969) and defined themselves by
cultural liberation defined as freedom from constraints—an early version of
1960s hippies: self discovery, emotion over logic, intuition, rebellion, free
love, Black jazz, and leftist politics. They developed an ingroup ideology that
functioned like a pseudo-ethnic identity: They had shared attitudes as boundary
markers, founding myths, iconic figures, and a utopian vision of an expressive,
egalitarian future. Another important figure in this mold was H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) who opposed Puritanism as
“moralistic, aesthetically barren and an impediment to American intellectual
development” (p. 153).

Many were in
open rebellion against the Christian, small-town culture they grew up in. Rebels
like Hutchins Hapgood were attracted to Jews because they
were the “other”: “I was led to spend much time in poor resorts of Yiddish New
York, through motives neither philanthropic nor sociological, but simply by
virtue of the charm I felt in men and things there.” Horace Kallen, the Jewish
philosopher of cultural pluralism, commented in 1915 on the effects of the
individualism of American intellectuals of the period:

The older
America, whose voice and spirit were New England, has … gone beyond recall.
Americans of British stock still are prevailingly the artists and thinkers of
the land, but they work, each for himself, without common vision or ideals. They
have no ethos, any more. The older
tradition has passed from a life into a memory. (quoted by Kaufmann as an
epigraph to Chapter 7, p. 144)

Expressive
individualism remained a marginal phenomenon until it became an integral part of
the counterculture of the 1960s — especially the hippie component of the 1960s
counterculture. At that point, it became ingrained in American mass culture as a
component of “Left-wing modernism” (p. 204), spreading “from the intellectual
elite to the better-educated sections of the political and economic elite: the
mass media, executive, judiciary, and top bureaucrats” (p. 205). The movement of
expressive individualism to the center of American culture therefore followed
rather than preceded the major cultural changes brought about, in Kaufmann’s
view, by the success of the New York Intellectuals (see below). Expressive
individualism therefore cannot be seen as causing the eclipse of
Anglo-America.

Liberal Protestantism. Kaufmann notes several strains of
liberal Protestantism in 19th-century thought. The Free Religious Association
(founded in 1867) was a more liberal offshoot of the Unitarians — the most
liberal strain of American religion. But again the members of the FRA thought of
their liberal attitudes as stemming from their ethnic heritage. After stating
that his religious movement intended to humanize (not Christianize) the entire
world, Francis E. Abbot, founder of the FRA, stated “The rest I need comes no
longer from spiritual servitude, but must be sought and found in the manly
exercise of freedom. It is to those who feel this Anglo-Saxoninstinct of liberty stirring in their
hearts that my words are addressed, — not to those who feel no galling pressure
from the easy yoke” (p. 90; my emphasis).

Merrill Gates(1848–1922), President of Rutgers
College and a Congregationalist preacher, also combined his religious
commitments with a belief that his political attitudes stemmed from his ethnic
heritage: “There is no other ‘manifest destiny’ for any man [than Liberty]…. To
this we [liberals] are committed, by all the logic of two thousand years of
Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon history, since Arminius … made a stand for liberty against the legions of Rome” (p. 90).
Kaufmann points out that “we should bear in mind that FRA members at this point
had failed to relinquish their Anglo-Protestant psychic redoubts, and none spoke
of stripping the nation of its implicitly white, Anglo-Saxon, or Protestant
heritage” (p. 91).

Many Protestants
believed that all Americans would eventually voluntarily become Protestants.
Religious leaders, particularly Methodists and Baptists, rejected the idea of
writing Christianity into the US Constitution, but they retained the belief that
the U.S. government was Christian. “Anglo Protestants wanted their tradition to
be supreme, but their universalist liberal commitments would not countenance
boundary-defining measures of legislative origin” (p. 47). Christianity would
retain its special place by persuasion, not coercion. As indicated below, the
liberal cosmopolitanism of the late 20th century has taken the opposite
strategy: Once it achieved power, it developed strong overtones of coercion,
including attempts to limit freedom of speech and remove people from their jobs
for beliefs and attitudes that conflict with the cosmopolitan zeitgeist — an
indication that liberal cosmopolitanism of the late 20th century is in a
critical sense not in the individualist tradition of America.

Moreover, even though
they did not approve of Catholicism, Protestant religious leaders in the 1840s
did not oppose Catholic immigration, believing that they could convert them to
“the ‘American’ faith” (p. 47) and absorb them into the Anglo-Saxon race.
Indeed, all races would immigrate to America for the new millennium: In the
words of a prominent Baptist, “In the gathering of all nations and races upon
our shores, do we not witness the providential preparation for a second
Pentacost that shall usher in the millennial glory?” (p. 49). All races would be
absorbed into the Anglo-Saxon race, their better qualities absorbed, “yet
remaining essentially unchanged” (p. 49). Kaufmann comments that “it is
necessary to understand that liberal and Anglo-Protestant attitudes were not
opposing viewpoints, but part of the same myth-symbol complex of dualistic
ethnic beliefs whose contradictions were obscured by a giddy, expansionist
spirit of optimism’ (p. 50).

Indeed, this is an
extreme form of egocentrism. What the good minister is saying is that all
peoples will eventually assimilate in race and religion to look and behave
pretty much like he does.

The period from
1900–1910 also saw the beginnings of a liberal Protestant elite willing to
sacrifice the dream of conversion for universalist, humanitarian ethics. The
idea that Anglo-Saxons would convert the world to Protestant Christianity—common
in the late 19th century—faded after 1910. This elite was more open to religious
relativity and criticized the implicit Whiteness of Christian missionaries. The
Federal Council of Churches (FCC, estab. 1908) became a key organizing body for
liberal Protestantism. In 1924, at the time when the US Congress was
overwhelmingly passing an immigration restriction bill biased toward immigration
from Northwestern Europe, the FCC resolved that

the assumption
of inherent racial superiority by dominant groups around the world is neither
supported by science nor justified by ethics. The effort to adjust race
relations on that basis and by the use of force is a denial of Christian
principles of the inherent superiority of ethical values and the supreme worth
of personality. As it applies to the white and Negro people in America it is a
philosophy that leads only to suffering and despair. (p. 124)

The FCC used
universalist passages from the New Testament rather than passages reflecting
Jewish ethnic interests from the Old Testament. This was an elite point of view,
and there was a major gap with popular attitudes. The 1920s saw the Protestant
masses devoted to immigration restriction and fearful of Communism and other
forms of political radicalism associated with immigrants, with many sympathetic
to the Ku Klux Klan. Despite these popular sentiments, the Protestant media and
ministers in the North and the South attacked the KKK throughout the 1920s. Some
liberal ministers were forced to leave their congregations because of popular
attitudes.

This elite
established itself at the highest levels of the culture well before the final
fall of Anglo-America: “From 1918 to 1955, the concept of national identity held
by Anglo-Protestant university administrators, intellectuals, federal
bureaucrats and the federal executive underwent a shift from a WASP conception
to a more pluralist construct” (p. 130). This elite attitude embraced pluralism
rather than assimilation.

But Liberal
Progressivism was not characteristic of the great mass of American Whites:
Liberal Progressives “soon found themselves marginal
not only to American society, but to the Progressive mainstream as well” (p.
105). During the 1920s there was a rise of fundamentalist, non-elite
Protestantism typified by figures like Billy Sunday, and Carl McIntire in opposition to the liberal elite
establishment. The masses of Protestants, even in liberal denominations, did not
buy into the cosmopolitanism of the elites. The FCC and the religious media
opposed the Reed-Johnson act of 1924—a position which was very much a minority
point of view. During the 1930s and the early stages of WWII, the only
successful attempt to get Protestants to respond positively to refugees was when
they were British. Jewish refugees were harder to place and the response was not
enthusiastic (p. 137). The FCC had no success in lobbying for the Wagner-Rogers
Bill that called for 20,000 German Jewish children to be admitted outside the
quotas.

The FCC entered
the mainstream when it condemned communism after WWII. But the leadership of the
FCC (now called the NCC) remained well to the left of its constituents
throughout. A study in the late 1960s showed that 33% of laity advocated civil
rights activism versus 64% of clergy; 89% of laity felt Black problems were
their own fault, versus 35% of clergy. 42% of laity backed the national origins
provisions versus only 23% of clergy. Kaufmann says that the elite had little
effect on the attitudes of the laity.

The Liberal
Progressives and ecumenical Protestants were an elite of university-educated
people who self-consciously thought of themselves as a “better element” — that
is, they had a sense of moral superiority. But Kaufmann acknowledges that this
“genteel Liberal Progressive vision was limited” (p. 144) and by itself probably
would not have resulted in profound cultural change. In general, the liberal
elite among the religions moved in step with their secular liberal brethren.
That is, they followed secular trends rather than led the trends, and as a
result they are ultimately of little importance for understanding the fall of
Anglo-Saxon America.

Academic Cultural Determinism and
Anti-Darwinism. In academic history in the late 19th century, Frederick
Jackson Turner thought of America as a melting pot in which the frontier
environment fused immigrants into an American race. The new race would not be
Anglo-Saxon or English but distinctively American. Turner was therefore a
Lamarckian — a believer in the idea that acquired traits could be inherited: The
American frontier environment shaped the characteristics of the new race which
were then passed down as genetic traits.

Nevertheless, Turner was
not sympathetic to the new immigrants. “Evidently, Turner had merely emphasized
one part of his inherited American ethnic mythology (frontier, liberty,
agrarianism) without jettisoning the other symbols (Protestantism, Nordic
whiteness)” (p. 52). But, as Kaufmann, notes, it was a short step from Turner’s
ideas to even more radical forms of liberal cosmopolitanism. His general
perspective was assimilationist — distrust of new immigrants combined with hope
that they would become culturally assimilated to Anglo-Saxon culture and a
common racial identity.

In the20th century, Franz Boas and
his students dominated the American Anthropology Association and had a wide
influence in other academic disciplines. Boasian anthropology is the premier
cultural determinism theory of the 20th century and may be
considered a Jewish intellectual movement. Kaufmann almost completely ignores Boas’s influence, but, as
discussed below, the Boasians were critical to the demise of Darwinism in the
social sciences and the demise of Darwinism was a critical linchpin in
underlying any viable intellectual basis for Anglo-Saxon ethnic defense. As
discussed below, without a Darwinian theory, the way was open to the erection of
a culture in which the intellectual establishment would view the eclipse of
Anglo-America as a moral imperative.

The Secular Left. Kaufmann credits two
Jews, Felix Adler
(1851–1933) and Israel Zangwill(1864–1926), with
pushing the 19th-century American universalist tendencies to the point of
completely rejecting ethnicity altogether. Adler founded the New York Society
for Ethical Culture in 1876 and became president of the Free Religious
Association (see above) in 1878. Kaufmann quotes Adler as advocating the
dissolution of Judaism via assimilation and eventually withering away:
“Individual members of the Jewish race [will] look about them and perceive that
there is as great and perhaps greater liberty in religion beyond the pale of
their race and will lose their peculiar idiosyncrasies, and their
distinctiveness will fade. And eventually, the Jewish race will die” (p. 92).
However, Adler believed that Jews should only “universalize themselves out of
existence when the task
[of ethnic dissolution of non-Jews] was complete" (p. 92). Indeed, Adler
declared that "So long as there shall be a reason of existence for Judaism, so
long the individual Jews will keep apart and will do well to do so" (p.
92).

According to
Adler, then, the "reason for existence" of Judaism was to evangelize his new
universalist religion of ethical culture until the whole world was converted.
Kaufmann observes that under Adler’s influence "Anglo-Protestant thinkers would
call for [Anglo-Protestantism's] termination as forthrightly as Adler did for
the Jews" (p. 92). In fact the Anglos applied Adler's doctrine more thoroughly
than he advocated for his own ethnic group.

Indeed, Adler’s ideas are remarkably congruent with the ideas of
prominent Reform Judaism rabbis of the period. Kaufmann Kohler
(1843–1926) is an important example of the Reform tendency (also seen, e.g., in
Kohler’s mentor, David Einhorn
(1809–1879), and Samuel Hirsch
(1815–1889 ) to assert that Jewish ethics is universalistic while at the same
time maintaining that Israel must remain separate while presenting a moral
beacon to the rest of humanity — a beacon of universalism and ethnic dissolution
of non-Jews. As I note in Separation and
Its Discontents (Ch. 7), “one
cannot underestimate the importance of the fact that the central pose of
post-Enlightenment Jewish intellectuals is a sense that Judaism represents a
moral beacon to the rest of humanity.”

This
suggests that Adler retained a Jewish identity. Adler was
married to a Jewish woman and maintained Jewish associates — for example, a
close friendship with Louis Brandeis.
Brandeis, who was an important Zionist activist of the period, was married to a
sister of Adler’s wife. But Adler “left Judaism
for a more rigorous, universalist and humanist non-theistic ministry that was
combined with progressive social action.”

Adler was thus the prototype of the 20th-century secular, leftist
Jewish political activist: opposing Anglo-Saxon ethnic hegemony and making
alliances with non-Jews with similar political sympathies.

My reviewof Jewish leftists shows that they
typically retained a strong sense of Jewish identification — often not
explicitly and not religiously, but rather in their friends, associates, spouses
and attitudes toward Jewish issues, especially anti-Semitism. Many Jewish
leftists who denied having Jewish identities found that they had a profound
commitment to Judaism with the rise of National Socialism in Germany and to
Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967. In general, Jewish identification of
non-religious Jews is complex, with Jewish identity more likely to surface
during perceived threats to Jews.

Israel Zangwill, the other Jewish advocate of ethnic dissolution
highlighted by Kaufmann, had a strong Jewish identity. Despite marrying a
non-Jew and advocating the dissolution of all ethnic groups, Zangwill was a
prominent advocate of a Jewish homeland and was active in Jewish politics
throughout his life.

Indeed, Zangwill was well
aware that Anglo-Saxon ideals of
individualism and universalism could be used in the battle against immigration
restriction. During the debate on the 1924 immigration law, the House Majority
Report emphasized the Jewish role in defining the intellectual battle in terms
of Nordic superiority and “American ideals” rather than in the terms of an
ethnic status quo actually favored by the committee:

The cry of discrimination is, the committee believes,
manufactured and built up by special representatives of racial groups, aided by
aliens actually living abroad. Members of the committee have taken notice of a
report in the Jewish Tribune (New
York) February 8, 1924, of a farewell dinner to Mr. Israel Zangwill which
says:

Mr. Zangwill spoke chiefly on the immigration question,
declaring that if Jews persisted in a strenuous opposition to the restricted
immigration there would be no restriction. “If you create enough fuss against
this Nordic nonsense,” he said, “you will defeat this legislation. You must make
a fight against this bill; tell them they are destroying American ideals. Most
fortifications are of cardboard, and if you press against them, they give
way.”

Although Kaufmann represents Zangwill as
advocating the melting together of all racial groups, the reality is a bit more
subtle. Zangwill’s views on Jewish-gentile intermarriage were ambiguous at best
and he detested Christian proselytism to Jews. Zangwill was an ardent Zionist
and an admirer of his father’s religious orthodoxy as a model for the
preservation of Judaism. He believed Jews were a morally superior race whose
moral vision had shaped Christian and Muslim societies and would eventually
shape the world, although Christianity remained morally inferior to Judaism.
Jews would retain their racial purity if they continued to practice their
religion: “So long as Judaism flourishes among Jews there is no need to talk of
safeguarding race or nationality; both are automatically preserved by the
religion” (Zangwill, quoted in Israel
Zangwill, by Joseph Leftowich, 1957, 161).

Despite the fact that the country as a whole had moved toward
ethnic defense, often with an explicitly Darwinian rationale, Adler was part of
a network of leftists who worked to undermine the cultural and ethnic
homogeneity of the US. An important node in this network was the Settlement
House movement of the late 19th century–early 20thcentury. The
settlements were an Anglo-Saxon undertaking that exhibited a noblesse oblige still apparent in some
White leftist circles today. They were “residences occupied by upper-middle-class
‘workers’ whose profile was that of an idealistic Anglo-Saxon,
university-educated young suburbanite (male or female) in his or her
mid-twenties” (p. 96). The movement explicitly rejected the idea that immigrants
ought to give up their culture and assimilate to America: “To put the immigrants
(as individuals) on an equal symbolic footing with the natives, a concept of the
nation was required that would not violate the human dignity of the immigrants
by denigrating their culture” (p. 97). Cultural pluralism was encouraged: “The
nation would be implored to shed its Anglo-Saxon ethnic core and develop a
culture of cosmopolitan humanism, a harbinger of impending global solidarity"
(pp. 97–98).

The leader of the Settlement House
movement, Jane
Addams, advocated that America shed all
allegiance to an Anglo-Saxon identity. Addams came from a liberal Quaker
background — another liberal strand of American Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture,
like the Puritans stemming from a distinctive British
sub-culture. In general, the Quakers have
been less influential than the Puritans, but their attitudes have been even more
consistently liberal than the Puritan-descended intellectuals who became a
dominant intellectual
liberal elite in the 19th century. For
example, John
Woolman, the “Quintessential
Quaker,” was an 18th-century figure who
opposed slavery, lived humbly, and, most tellingly for the concept of ethnic
defense, felt
guilty about preferring his own children to
children on the other side of the world.

A connection between Jane Addams and the
Puritan intellectual tradition was that Harvard philosopher William James
influenced Addams and approved her ideas. James was a member of Felix Adler’s
Ethical Culture society— a group that Kaufmann terms “the fount of Jewish
cosmopolitanism” (p. 101), and his student was Horace
Kallen, the premier theorist of a
multicultural America—and an ardent Zionist. William James was a moral
universalist: “Moral progress is a value that outweighed group survival,” a
point of view that “reaffirmed Felix Adler’s cardinal dictum that particular
ethnic groups had a duty to sacrifice their existence for the progress of
humankind. … The dominant Anglo-Saxon group had no case for its preservation but
instead needed to devote itself to bring about the new cosmopolitan humanity”
(p. 102). This was a rarified phenomenon of a small but elite minority — even
many settlement workers believed in an Anglo-Saxon America and favored
immigration restriction.

Randolph Bourne’s AtlanticMonthly
article (1916) is a classic statement
of a multicultural ideal for America. Bourne (who, as Kaufmann notes, was a
disciple of Horace Kallen; see also here) acknowledged the concern
that different nationalities hadn’t blended, but he advocated that America
become the first “international nation” — a “cosmopolitan federation of national
colonies.” All other ethnic groups
would be allowed to retain their identity and cohesion. It is only the
Anglo-Saxon that is implored to be cosmopolitan. In particular, Bourne wrote
that “it is not the Jew who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and
boasts of that venerable culture of his who is dangerous to America, but the Jew
who has lost the Jewish fire and become a mere elementary, grasping animal.”

People like Bourne, H. L. Mencken, and Sinclair Lewis had a
strong sense of intellectual elitism and rebellion against Protestant,
small-town America. A character in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street complains that the
townspeople have a “standardized background … scornful of theliving. … A savourless people, gulping
tasteless food … and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world” (p.
158). The character was mildly excited by Scandinavian immigrants but deplored
the fact that they were absorbed without a trace into the mainstream Protestant
culture of America.

These attitudes could also be found among
Jewish intellectuals. Walter Lippmann called America “a nation of villagers” (p.
156)—a harbinger of the hostility of Hollywood to small-town America discussed
below.